


No such thing

by orphan_account



Category: Conan the Barbarian (2011)
Genre: Adventure, Anti-Hero, Canon-Typical Violence, Demons, Fantasy, Gen, Magic, Original Character(s), Swords & Sorcery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 05:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Cimmerian knows peace only when he seeks war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No such thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kitrazzle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitrazzle/gifts).



Conan, known once _of Cimmeria_ and raised from birth like a warrior of the old world; he loved the dead. And it was fierce, that love. And it was a fire burning on a poisoned altar, a lake of blood in his heart; and it drove him to hunt, to journey through lands marked on maps only with fingerprints and shadows, until he reached the fortress Khor Kalba, a keep raised on stolen shores and mortared with necromancer's blood, a dark shell sealed around the bandit-king and his daughter.

And Conan, son of vengeful Cimmeria, he split open the fortress, scoured it of kings and daughters, watched it fall into the deep crevices of the world with the ghosts of his lost people gazing candle-eyed over his shoulders.

And when this — his quest and his rebirth — had been finished, he found that it was not enough.

His love for that dead place, for that long lost time, it burned in him. He had fed it red gifts, pieces of his enemies, the broken links of slaver's chains, malevolent relics, black spires, bonemeal, a sword wrapped up in bloody funeral veils, honour laid on his father's remains.

And it whispered in him: _not enough_.

 

* * *

 

The northern reaches rang with silence, darkness, cold. These were the ancient banners of Cimmeria but Conan found that they were strange to him, hostile and suffocating. Not for the first time, he took up his weapons and journeyed south.

In his youth he had fled down roads leading out of the highlands, pursued by ghosts. Their faces were in the rain and fog, in the smears of ash melting into the soil, in the ruins of his village. Only the stone smithy had stood resolute, and it was black and hollow and horrible. He could not look at it. He had gone south, to the long summers and the arrogant taint of civilization, and began to build his vengeance there. Now, it was to the south he went again; but following those known roads, those same haunted footsteps, it had set his bloodthirst twisting in him. By the time he had returned to Argos, he had decided to press further, to leave the familiar behind. He would go further south than before and see what the blazing sun had left to show him. There would be menacing creatures to feed to his furies. He was sure of it. There would be unworthy men to dare his wrath. He was sure.

At the harbour in Messantia he found a ketch willing to ferry passengers for coins and service. It was called _Wayfarer_ and it carried Conan along the shining coast of the continent. Suspended between sky and earth, shore and horizon, he felt the immediacy of his fervor subside. Anger and melancholy went out of him for a time, spreading like sunlight to mingle with the brine and darkness of the deep waters below. Of all the places he had gone in his life, he loved the sea best. As a child of those dark evergreen forests and rolling hills in the hard north, this felt like a small betrayal of his heritage; but violence was his joy, and he shared it with the sea. When storms came, it opened its black throat with howling and threw the beasts that rode its back. Such passions and tumults were Conan's own. Currents were cunning. Waves were hungry tongues lapping the blood from pirates' swords. He could think of no creature more beautiful or ruthless in all the world.

 _Wayfarer_ brought him to Khemi in Stygia, a stranger land than he had ever known; and then onto Kush, stranger still, where shadows seemed to lie like stagnant pools in the daylight. A thought had entered Conan's mind as he had journeyed into these true southern waters: he would return to the land at Kush, crown of the legendary Black Kingdoms, and seek one of the sorcerers for which the region was famed. It was said that there were practitioners among the Kushites who could dispel demons with a touch, who could speak with ghosts and see the future. Perhaps it would be worth seeking one of those services, he mused, though he had not decided which could best serve his present needs.

The ketch turned back on its route like a weaver's shuttle at the port city Zabhela, so it was there that Conan disembarked and looked for the first time upon legendary Kush. Old tales leapt nimbly to the surface of his memory, reflecting bright images of shivering radiance, shrieking birds and deep shadows; and yet Zabhela was drab when he saw it there before him, the streets grey and ragged under his salt-burned boots. Throngs of people in all sizes and colours mingled at market when he arrived, choking his path, vexing his progress. Strange and fantastic wares were displayed all around but he had no eye for them. He pressed impatiently past tables and nooks adorned with snakeskin gloves, poisoned arrows, short swords worked in flat black metal, flavoured smoking leaves, tiny amber pendants, lacquered scorpion shells, crystal, bones, leather; trinkets. Trash, he thought. He had come for a far rarer commodity: advice. But no one could tell him where to find a worker of sorcery and summoning. Or, if their knowledge was not lacking, no one _would_ tell him. He had a look the Kushites disliked, perhaps. He wore a token that offended them, or spoke with an accent that marked him far removed from their world. The frankness of his own manner was met only with sly, dismissive apologies; and he thought of years before, himself as a boy, enduring scorn and syrupy pity as he searched the coastal cities like a bloodhound for news of bandits, all while his quarry had been granted unnatural good fortune, transformed beyond recognition into Khalar Zym the bandit-turned-king.

Conan left Zabhela on foot, following a darkly-worn road that threaded through the tangle of inland jungle. His disappointment in the city was quickly eclipsed by wonder at its natural surroundings; he found that Kush's wilds filled all the stories he had heard and then burst beyond them. Trees looped and flowed together in great stands along his path, their canopies carving darkness into the bloated sky. Every branch was adorned with emerald leaves, and every leaf rustled with the movement of some tiny, bejeweled bird or amphibian scuttling through berry-burned shadows. Among all the wooded lands he had seen, Conan knew of no match for the dense forests he encountered in Kush. It was stunning and beautiful scenery; but his instincts boiled in him, galled by the heat and the changeable light. Behind brilliant flowers he supposed that he saw a glittering of intelligent eyes. For every creature he could discern a dozen more surely lurked unseen around him. The lush undergrowth pressed near, plying him with its fairness. He imagined a sheath of velvet wrapped over talons and daggers and bones. A soft skin draped over a ragged pit. A theft concealed with a smile. It reminded him of something he had overheard in Argos long ago: _for the most dreadful nature, the most lovely disguise._

* * *

 

As night gathered in the ghostly spaces between trees, Conan settled his belongings and prepared to spend a night foxholed in the jungle, watchful but content. If there were wild beasts or men who dared to approach him, he would welcome them with a swift, silvery end to their curiosity — and it would be good to flex his sword arm again, at last it would cycle the hot heart-blood humming against his lungs. He had gone without the thrill of cutting down wicked men for too long and a dull longing for it beat like a wardrum inside him. Many tales of Kush described crawling horrors and feral magic that lurked deep and lost in lands where no men had walked in hundreds of years. Conan nearly hoped those horrors would range wide on this night and seek him out. Like any other land, Kush was a country whose legends were authored by the fearful. It was splendid, yes; it promised adversity, to be sure; but it could not destroy anyone who did not fear it.

In the templed heights of the canopy, a strange bird called out in alarm as he settled for sleep.

Conan was poised to defend himself in an instant. He came to one knee, crouching down among the scrambled darkness of a tall fern, eyes raised along the straight edge of his sword. As he watched, fragments of night sky seemed to blink above him, interrupted by some dark, liquid form pouring downward, untouched by the light of moon or stars. Only a crimson gleam followed it, a wandering splendor like fire against rubies. Down it came through the high branches, and down along the smooth trunk. Down to the forest floor, where it was lost for a moment in the undergrowth. Still Conan waited and watched, unmoving. Listening for the gentlest footfall. Aware of leaves turning thoughtfully away as a creature pressed silently through them. _A wolf,_ he thought when it emerged before him, though it was like no wolf he had ever seen. Black like the core of a mountain, it stood thin and leering just beyond the reach of his blade, eyes and mouth opened on a ghastly red fire crackling in the bowl of its skull.

An unnatural hush held the wood and the winds in silence. Conan's blood seethed like a whisper in his ear, or else the beast spoke, sweet-voiced; and then it trembled as if it might leap; and then there was a great crashing outside of Conan's sight, a snapping of twigs, hurried steps coming up behind him.

He turned, swung a ruthless crescent that would take the head from a charging man — but it was a slim, short figure that raced past him until it finally stomped to a halt between Conan and the demon. For an instant, the scene in that clearing was frozen, bathed in stillness and the silver wash of stars. It was a girl, Conan thought in wonder. Bird-boned and crowned with a thick coil of shining, baubled hair. Her spine slithered like a snake in her back as she drew in breath, recovering from her forward charge; and then she was walking closer to the hellish animal grinning slyly among the ferns, seemingly intent on confronting it. Certain that he would see her torn in half, Conan started forward as the girl reached out, drew close enough in time to hear her say: "Go back home."

Tapped once on its nose, the demon dropped to ash on the fallen leaves underfoot.

Conan dropped back immediately. Another fiend, he thought, or a sorcerer of a kind that had never been described beyond this forest. With his sword still leveled to hold an attacker at bay, he went down to his knee again, slowly. "Girl," he said, "I will not kill you but I demand that you turn and tell me your name."

She turned. Like many of the men and women Conan had seen in Zabhela, she went bare-chested and her hair was pinned up in an elaborate knotwork with wooden ornaments. She wore lengths of cloth at her hips and a leather girdle stuffed with gathered objects; flowers, feathers, bark. She looked to Conan like a little woodland spirit, a free wanderer holding no grudges or agendas. But he did not lower his blade. He had witnessed her speed, her strange ability, and it shook him. He could not trust a being that did not balk from steel.

"Your name," he said again.

"You will not kill me," she replied, stepping around him slowly. It seemed that she meant to calm him but her motions were still too graceful, too precise. On an instinctive level, it angered him to watch her. "The red maw will not allow it."

"Your name." Cold this time, his voice. A chill down his throat to quiet his thundering heart.

It gave her pause, that low, measured command. With a soft sigh, she stopped. "My name is Mernaz but there are more important things for which you should ask. Ask: what is the height of this tree that bore a deadly thing? Ask: is there a cure in this forest for the poisons inflicted by wound-rot? Fortunately you do not need to climb and I think you have not been wounded. Also I think you are hungry, and I have food. I invite you to my home." When Conan made no response, she began to back away, adding: "It is not so far."

"I refuse."

"How rude," Mernaz commented, moving back in the direction from which she had first appeared. Briefly she paused and crouched deliberately down in the darkness. Conan tensed, strained to see what she was reaching to claim. It was, however, only a bag on a wide strap. "Why?"

"I have no hungers."

"No? And yet I see you twisting in their grip even now," Mernaz said, shouldering her bag again. Its weight pulled her slightly off-balance and Conan felt himself relax, seeing her nimbleness blunted. "You may come with me if you would care to discuss that."

Without fear, she turned her back on him and vanished behind a low branch. There was a long moment between the fading of her footsteps and the gentle rise of night-sounds as the insects and watchful creatures nearby resumed their soft chirrups and sighs and rustles. Conan spent that moment staring at the still leaves, half-expecting to see the glint of red eyes drawing toward him again. She could be a witch, he mused. She _was_ a beastmaster, it seemed, and there would likely be more fell creatures lurking in her territory. In some ways, he told himself, it would be wiser to stay inside her guard.

In other ways, of course, it would be courting true peril; but he gathered his supplies quickly and followed her clear track with sword in hand. He had not come to Kush only to shy from its perils. He was unmarked by fear, and his heart beat fiercely in his chest, steady as the marching steps of warriors in the north.

 

* * *

 

"Why are you here?" Mernaz asked; and while he still lingered in the low doorway forming an answer she continued cannily, "A man who would accept such an invitation must be looking for enchanted treasure or advice in seeking his gods."

"I have no wish to carry treasure. And I know where to find Crom if I need him," Conan said, studying the cottage's crowded interior with an eye for open spaces, hidden weapons, prowling pets. Nothing threatening presented itself to him immediately. Against the far wall, oily meat was cooking over a firepit, casting the room in a haze of smoke and rich scent. Plants hung drying overhead and every surface was laid with animal bones and pelts, the bright shells of insects, brilliant plumes, dark stones, all the spoils of a collector's browsings in the deep jungle. Firelight spilled odd, wriggling shadows across the walls and floor, like fingers twisting into unnatural shapes and sigils. Conan set his belongings by the stooped entrance and kept his sword and daggers with him, talismans against the things that might be folded away from his sight.

"Crom?" Mernaz said, looking at him with interest as he came to her table. "I have this knowledge as well. Crom is on the peak of his cold mountain. In the belly of an enemy. At the threshold of your death. That is what they say, if I have heard it correctly." Her eyes did not leave him but Conan felt that she may have looked into the dark above him, behind him, all around him. Somehow. "If you know where to find him, you are also aware that he is the god who does not hear prayers."

"I know it."

"That thought would crush some kinds of men."

This was not a question but Conan met it directly. "Some kinds of men are easily crushed."

Mernaz smiled and her face was sweet. She was like a child, Conan realized. Young as he had been when he left ashes of his old life to embark on a long and bloody quest. "Why are you here, so far from grim Cimmeria?"

 _Vengeance,_ he nearly said, because that had been true for so long — but now, no longer. His vengeance had been claimed, Khalar Zym was dead; and yet Conan was still galled and bereaved. Zym had died the way Conan's people had died, stunned and unprepared. Perhaps that was the way of all dying and all loss, but it felt thin. Inadequate. His great purpose had been achieved. Still, his heart smouldered. Still, the dead watched his deeds.

"I was a pirate for a time," he said finally. "I have been a mercenary and a queen's guard as well. I have killed many men and stolen great fortunes and artifacts. I have known many beautiful women. All of these things brought me satisfaction." He sat and looked for a time at the fire crackling under meat, meaning to speak again, slowly forgetting what he had intended to say.

"They no longer do," Mernaz said from somewhere nearby.

"No. I've thought about these things. My home was destroyed, that was a hardship. But since then I have been strong enough to stand against anything. Anger put courage in my heart and power in my hands. I have used both to their fullest. The man who took my people from me; he died within days once I had found him. With an army at his hand and a relic of power bound to him, he died." Conan nodded to finally say it aloud. "I cannot be stopped."

Bronzed in firelight and smooth in darkness, Mernaz's expression did not change. She seemed to regard him with patience and irritation at once, then suddenly glanced out at the clearing beyond her door. A small shape came flitting through it to sniff at her feet. Conan's fingers, resting on the hilt of a dagger, flexed once; but he saw that it was merely a soft, long-limbed monkey, coming in from the cold night to pick at her skirts. It leaped up into her lap and she gathered it in her arm absently. "And you came to this jungle supposing that Kush needed to hear you gloat?"

"I came to ask a sorcerer what trials there are in the world. What monsters or great warriors I have left to face."

"You could travel in search of them," Mernaz said dismissively.

"I have travelled. What I found was not enough."

The little monkey cradled in her arm looked at him then, piercingly. It was only then that Conan noted its gleaming crimson eyes. He stood, and it hissed quietly. In a long motion he could not quite follow, it bled under Mernaz's elbow to the packed floor and scuttled behind her. When it emerged into the open, it had regained its full height and form, the black body of a wild dog, the eyes and mouth filled with embers.

Slowly, Mernaz came to her feet as well. "Calm," she said. "Beast, and beast."

She walked to the back of the cottage as though neither of them merited attention. Tracking her movement without taking his eyes from the demon grinning at his feet, Conan became aware of patterned details scattered through the room. Light picked out the teeth and sockets of collected skulls wherever they nestled among softer trifles. All were turned at precise angles, Conan noticed, to stare hollow-eyed in the same direction. Toward the fire, where Mernaz stirred crackling embers and turned the cooking meat. Smoke wrapped her up like fine garments as she knelt there on the lip of the stone pit. It seemed strange somehow to see her perform a task so menial under the watchful gaze of so many dead. "The red maw herself is no threat. She is an augury. A sign of things to come for the people who meet her, and a guide for the person who follows. Or so I was told by the person she led when I met her," Mernaz said, and her smile was made grotesque by the smoke around her, the fire below.

"This thing," Conan replied, "is no _she_."

Perhaps he expected some outburst from the creature; fury from a monster, or simple proof that it understood. As if to spite him, the demon only sat, cinders lolling from its mouth.

"I can hardly pretend to know if you are right," Mernaz called, "but she reminds me of myself sometimes."

Mernaz rose and briefly the light painted her into a phoenix lifting from a cool pyre. By the time the image had faded from Conan's eye, she had already returned to her seat. If she was not a sorceress by craft, Conan thought, she was a natural conjurer, touched by some elemental force that cast illusions through her as if she was a prism. She was likely the more dangerous entity of the two who sat before him, but he could not bring himself to mistrust her. Was that more magic? He thought not. After all, it simply had been a very long time since he had conversed with anyone who did not cringe from him.

Another moment's pause. Then he sat down again to meet the level of Mernaz's gaze and fixed her with the brooding stare that had turned away so many hard men and fierce women. She did not flinch. She was like a stone idol, some youthful form shelled in amber, ageless and immovable. It occurred to him then that perhaps he should say: "In fact I am here because you extended a certain invitation."

A spring flower, her smile. It bloomed all at once like the rare, colourful thistles that would speckle the Cimmerian hills when the snows receded. "Did you know that you are the very first to accept it? Such courage. I think you should be rewarded for it. When the red maw next leaves this place, you must be the one to follow her. See where she goes. It may help you."

"Why should it leave?" Conan asked, looking to the beast. Content here in warmth and shadow, free to terrorize wanderers in the wood, he could not believe that it wanted for anything.

"Why should she stay? Her purpose is not clear to me. I know only what little I have been told, and what I feel. And I feel at peace."

Conan scoffed. "What peace does it offer you, menacing travellers in the night so that you might bring them here?"

Mernaz shrugged. "I have always wished to offer kindness and shelter to a traveller well and truly lost."

Beside her, the demon slid to the floor on stiff forelegs, rumbling in its chest, looking for all the world like an old dog on a bed of heated bricks. In a perfect imitation of Mernaz's soft voice muted by the great sweep of dark jungle, it said: "Go back home."

Conan stood.

"Thank you, then," he said, "for your kindness. I will leave."

Courtesy cost him nothing, so he inclined his head to her before turning away. He half-expected to feel great claws rend him, or to be held against his will by some magical force, but nothing pursued or impeded him as he walked to the door.

"You would be safest against a tree, I think," Mernaz called as he reached for his pack. "Moreso in the corner here, if you could bear to stay, but I will leave that choice up to you. I did promise you food, remember. It will be ready soon."

"You're very eager for company." Conan paused to look back at her, saw only an empty stool and the many-coloured blanket where she had rested her feet.

"I told you," she said, emerging from a dark alcove concealed in the wall with a grass pallet under her arm. "Just an idle wish."

He watched her spread the pallet out in a place he would likely have chosen for himself, his intention balanced evenly between concession and flat refusal. As if stirred by his indecision, the red maw stood, stretched, and walked outside. It curled just beyond the door in the rattling leaves. He could see only its eyes, fixed on him; and then even those vanished, like candles snuffed out.

Without a word, he went to the pallet Mernaz had laid out for him, set down his things and leaned back against them. She did not comment on his decision to accept her hospitality, only went about her business around her home. When she looked over again from the firepit, he had a slab of flatbread pointedly in hand. It seemed not to perturb her at all. She knelt, stirring and feeding the fire, her dark body lit all over as though she were draped in gems and gold. He watched her as he ate, but she did not move away from the hearth or speak to him. She was still there when he arranged his weapons as he liked them on nights spent in unknown parts. She was still there when, finally, he slept.

 

* * *

 

The red maw was waiting for him in the clearing at dawn like a slit of blindness cut into his eye.

Mernaz had not been at the fire when he woke. Nor was she in any part of the cottage Conan could discover. Over the cold, silvered corpse of the pit, the meat appeared to have been lowered and burned off, searing down to the last long, cracked bone. He did not spend any longer in that place, not knowing what it contained or what those contents might portend. He took up what belonged to him, leaving all else untouched. Returning to the jungle path was his only motive — and there sat the demon, its own motives unfathomable.

It loped off at the sight of him, not in the direction he meant to go; and Conan followed it as Mernaz had suggested. There were many reasons to do anything but that, and yet he could not think of what he _would_ do otherwise. He had met his first Kushite sorcerer of one sort or another and he felt no desire to meet any more of that kind. In the absence of a quest, travel was his only aim. A fixed destination would be an unfortunate obstacle underfoot. And truthfully he felt compelled to see where such a beast would take him. Mernaz had spoken as if it were a witching rod for something nameless, something intangible. It led. It found. Presumably it would guide him in search of his wishes and wants. In Conan's mind this was hardly a complex divination. He had intended to go forth seeking battle and adversity blindly. So, he thought, why not let the horrid dog start him on his way? Why not see what it might witch out?

He tracked it like quarry across rivers and through rainforest, always facing south. Lost lands found him. Venomous serpents twined in his path. The red maw picked its way unerringly beyond the end of the world as it was marked on Messantia's maps, but Conan did not hesitate. He followed it into the Black Kingdoms.

 

* * *

 

The lair of the nameless worm festered deep in the folds of the Amazon, forgotten even by the Kushite cities perched on the lip of that ancient, misty valley that had once marked the southern end of the world. It lived in that valley, the white worm; and in that valley frothed a primeval forest where vines looped like intestines and animals screamed into silence from their secret dens; and in that forest yawned a midnight cave; and on that cave stood a temple crafted in basalt, unmarked by time or tools, darker than any stone or earth Conan had ever touched. It loomed sharp and clean in the fetid vegetation, but the sight was not welcoming. His eye strained to behold it against the sky, so great was its height and so dark its substance. Like a wound cut in the side of sunlight, it crouched like a starving cat on the sunken valley floor. To the very bottom of the world's dry crust went the red maw, and Conan went with it, growing ever more bewildered.

On the temple steps: a priest wearing silk, gold, and plumage that spilled down his back like a rainbow confronted them. He would not allow Conan to enter the monumental structure without first offering tribute. There was a huge, sealed door that could only be opened by pleasing the white worm in the Black Kingdom with a kingly gift. Treasure, he demanded, or sacrifice.

On the temple steps: Conan struck the priest down with a single blow, seeing madness in his pale eyes. Blood washed the basalt gate, and it cracked and shattered and Conan's heart leaped anew, spreading the flood of his shock to straighten his spine and harden his hands. Danger and mystery opened themselves to the world through that passage like flowers seeded in darkness. And Conan, son of distant Cimmeria; he would be the first to walk among them. For an instant, the thrill of untold discovery reared in him and he was a child again, racing through thick forest in the cool highland wind. But as he savoured that moment, the red maw bit at him, drove him inside, a pestilence witching his steps.

The temple was utterly without light and a foul stench drowned its echoing vaults. Blind, Conan felt his way through the great tunnels with his shield hanging heavy on his arm. The wall was impossibly smooth beneath his hand, though occasionally he would encounter a wetness smeared upon it that matched the texture of ground meat. Growths, or the gore of violence? He could not be sure and finally took his hand away, navigating instead by the fire of the red maw's presence. Onward he followed that glowing grin; and on and on it ran. If the light of its gaze happened to touch some pillar or stairway, it was only for the briefest instant. Then the landmark would be gone, swallowed back into the endless pitch leaning down from above, reaching up from below. Once, when the demon' fiery eyes suddenly blinked out, Conan imagined that it had abandoned him to the dark. He did not call for it, only stopped and waited. And a moment later, his own voice came to him from mere paces ahead: "Why should it leave?"

As they descended long sloped halls and curling stairways, the walls stole in closer, swelling like sails. The red maw's radiance cast out more brightly as the great open spaces dwindled. Conan began to see signs of hand-cut marks in the stone, wayfinding notes and pictograms that meant nothing to him. The passage narrowed to a tunnel that did not branch or wander and he paused then, lashed his shield to his exposed back and sheathed his broadsword, suddenly favouring the lighter, more precise arc of curved daggers in his hands.

The tunnel opened without warning on a large, circular chamber, wide as a gasp. A horrific stench of rot filled Conan senses, staggering him, and he pressed his back to the wall while his body struggled and fought the tainted air moving like slop in his lungs. Even the red maw stood for a moment against him, its ears flattened, looking displeased. But nothing came for them in that unguarded instant. No ghouls rushed in to gouge Conan's eyes, no acolytes charged to slit his throat. The chamber was quiet and dim, suffused with gentle light from a misty white globe set deep in the stone floor, its visible curve more than three lengths of Conan's height. Mystified, he edged nearer. Around it were laid long forms, familiar in shape. There was a span of time in which Conan stared at them without comprehension. Human bodies, he saw at last. More than a dozen men and women, unconscious on their backs, arranged like the rays of light around their white sun. They looked to Conan like people from every part of the world he could imagine. He walked the circumference of the chamber slowly, examining them. All were naked, and all were connected to the white globe by winding, hairlike threads wrapped around their faces or throats, filling their mouths.

In disgust, he looked to the red maw. "You bring me to desecrate a cursed tomb?"

It prowled the bodies curiously, painting those gaunt, pale faces with a demonic blush. "I could not say," it answered in a male voice Conan did not recognize; then it coughed hot ash, cried fervently, "Obedience or death!"

Tension locked the muscles against Conan's spine. He stood straight and still as the echo of that shout ground itself down to silence on the rough walls. When the beast came into his sight around the globe, he glowered at it with a depthless fury. It only laughed at him in some stolen, musical tone and sniffed the shoulder of an old woman, wrinkling its nose. A mimic, Conan realized darkly. Voiceless until engaged with some statement it might steal.

He knelt among the bodies to inspect them for breath. All were still and cool to the touch but they looked robust and healthy save for their stillness. It was to the globe, then, that he went with revulsion and wonder, mulling on his obtuse instructions. The surface was thin and bellied away from Conan's touch like fabric on water. Within it, soft light swirled. Conan stared into it until his eyes ached, trying to discern some form or pattern at its centre. No such design presented itself. He looked about again, considered slicing the threads, or inflicting a shallow cut in an attempt to stir the body from its stupor. Frustration flexed in him. He had followed the demon, and it led him not to face warriors or marvels but to trip over sleeping slugs.

"Wake up," he said irritably; and the surface of the globe rippled as if a wave had unrolled beneath it. Conan backed away, glancing down at a body near his feet. Deep-set in a perfectly blank face, he found himself meeting wide eyes, open to an abyss.

Immediately he withdrew to the wall and waited. There was no movement, save for the red maw as it ran a circle around the chamber. The change clearly amused it. Picking its way between nerveless limbs in an insolent dance, it barked and cackled, loud enough to wake even these lost dreamers. Each crack of its many voices sent ripples through the globe but there was no other response. No words, Conan thought; no conscious instruction. A dark suspicion formed in his mind and he snapped, "Stand."

As one, the many forms came to their feet fluidly. Obedient. They stood, nothing more or less. Conan approached one, a young man with curling blond hair. To him, he said flatly, "You. Attack me."

The blond boy obeyed. In an instant, he had ripped the thread from his mouth and lunged at Conan with no care for his own defense. The assault came with such speed and savage abandon that Conan was caught by surprise. Short nails scratched across his throat and jaw, nearly drawing blood, before he could drive a dagger under the boy's ribs. He bled like any other youth but still frothed and raged until he had been put down with several fatal wounds. When he was still at last, Conan rounded on the globe. It pulsed serenely, cruel as the moon.

"All of you," he said, hardly thinking. "Leave this place."

Dead-eyed, they pulled themselves free of the silver threads and left, one by one, the way that Conan had entered until only he and the red maw remained. The demon dared to make a strange sound at him, a dog's whine of annoyance and incomprehension, as he walked to the globe and thrust both daggers into it, slicing the silken membrane so that it tore and flapped as if in a gale. And there was a rumble from below that briefly suggested catastrophe; and, in his mind, Conan ran through the turns and corners he had taken to reach the chamber, retracing the path back to the twisted jungle. But the stones held firm and a second membrane burst, poured a luminous, reeking substance across the floor. As the liquid spread, its light weakened. Conan had only a instant to see the rapid motion of other smooth membranes slipping beneath the gap in the chamber floor, segments advancing like the carts in a hideous caravan.

Then there was only familiar darkness, and the red maw leading him upward, back to sunlight; and by that doleful, humid light, his first sight was of those empty human bodies swarming over the remains of the priest on the hot, black steps, pulling things loose, holding them, eating them, senseless to the horror of what they did. Conan did not look closely at them, only took his sword and beheaded each one. He did not try to think of what else he could have ordered them to do, what command might have returned them to a better state. Better now, he assured himself, then as they were when he found them.

Standing in the tropic sun, surrounded by the drone of insects and the inward hum of windless depths, Conan felt a weary dissatisfaction come over him. He was not sure what it meant, or what he thought he had accomplished. There had been, he supposed, an opportunity for him to do a great deed. It was the same way he had felt at Khor Kalba, watching Khalar Zym fall.

At the foot of the steps, the red maw waited. Merely fey and feral it had seemed to him before. Now, knowing more of its nature, he went down to meet it full of loathing.

"What next, brute?" he asked. A challenge to its gloating serenity, a dare.

The hateful thing, it drooled hellfire and sweetness onto the burning bloody stone until he threatened it with steel. Then it simply jerked its head sharply around and slipped cleanly back into the knots of thicket, as if it had him on a tether, as if he had no choice but to hurry after its shadow.

 

* * *

 

North, out of the Amazon and the clutches of Kush, to the deserts burning in the east. Back inside the shining plane of the known world, the red maw guided Conan to the limit of all things green and growing, lured him out to long sands piled up like mounds of gold. A different kind of hardship assailed him here, a dry and creeping heat that wound out of the unblinking sun and skimmed the dunes to catch and constrict him, serpent around prey. It was like nothing Conan had ever experienced. Kush and the tropics were hot as a forge, but even the hottest woodland carried great stores of water within itself. In every forest, a lake was held secret under each leaf, broken and scattered into dewdrops beyond counting. No clever journeyman would die of thirst in a place where sky-bearing trees flourished.

But the desert! It despised living things, hissed at them through its cracked teeth, drank them down to bones. Conan stumbled between outposts and nomads' camps on the red maw's tail, astonished that people would choose to make any claim to such a pitiless part of the world. For days and nights, he felt sure that his trial here was in survival alone, putting one foot before the other, watching the shimmering sands flow beneath him as though he were any other dark rock or twisted bramble cooked nearly to coal. He wrapped himself in all the cloth he owned in an effort to prevent his skin from seizing into unbending leather. Those days and nights were taxing, blazing and frigid by turns of the sun and moon.

And yet, slowly, this suffering became precious to him. Each day was a prize wrested from the gnarled hand of death itself. The red maw came and went, kept him on a vague path — always east, down the pitch of morning light into the rising sun — but seemed not to have any particular for him. Exposure was a fierce enough foe, it seemed to think, and it led Conan in slow circles beneath the whirling sun. They trekked through stinging winds, climbing and descending the slopes of dunes that flowed underfoot like melting mountains. Camps were the seed of salvation, wavering day by day in Conan's eye like a dream. The inhabitants were hard folk, naturally, who often greeted him with the point of a weapon; but even pinned in a wheel of blades, Conan took great effort to do them no harm. They reminded him of Cimmerians, these thin and dark-robed people, they were cast from the same metal in a different mold. Burning exhaustion and clinging thirst they battled here, rather than deep chill and hunger; and yet their tenacity was the twin of any Cimmerian's. Eventually, most would grant him shelter by night, a cracked water-bearing vessel or scrap of food in exchange for his stories of travel and hardship. As he won their guarded friendliness, they also offered him rarer services: treatment of his weapons to protect them from the grinding sand, directions to oases shining low in the sun. Warnings they offered as well, sharing tales of the desert bandits that struck out east from Zamboula and slew any they encountered.

Bandits. The mere thought drove Conan into a cold black rage. Miserly cowards skulking in lands where life itself was hard-won, destroying goof lives. Their targets were the travelling caravans that carted rich wares to green Vendhya, but they would prey merrily on these families and tribes whose bloodlines were tied to the desert. Setting out before dawn from a camp that had once lost wandering youths to that honourless kind, Conan called the red maw from its own midnight villainy with a simple command.

"Take me to those criminals who range the desert for riches to steal," he hissed to the demon. "Sniff them out. I know you can."

In the half-light, its fires had flared readily, pleased by the prospect of a hunt. This, Conan had to admit, was an affliction that he shared with the creature. His heart soared as they went forth with purpose, wrapped in bloodthirst and berserker's fury. Thieves' lairs littered the burning sands, well-hidden but poorly-defended. Conan raided them with the demon at his back, leaving only corpses to twist under the siphoning sun. Three dens he struck in as many days, stealing a hard-tempered pony from the first lot he slew to make his travels easier. It went on for weeks, this demon's tail to his retribution. He saw fantastic stockpiles of textiles, armour, spices, gems, and he ignored the richness of it all, left the spoils to bake and freeze until they cracked, undiscovered. Food and drink were the only goods he took for himself. A dozen bands fell beneath his sword, nearly a hundred men in all, left to lie like wards against others of their kind, eyes and mouths open, wounds dressed with sand. He thought nothing of it until he came upon a camp where the people asked him if he had encountered a black devil of their folklore, said to have emerged from the sands to water it with evil blood.

Perhaps in his youth, this would have pleased him. Infamy for noble deeds, his own works braided with legend. Not so, here and now. He felt that it was anonymity he sought, riding veiled and shapeless over the gleaming hills. Even here in the great wastes, facelessness eluded him. The red maw became agitated apace with him, daring ever closer to the camps at night, and Conan feared what might come to pass if a child chased after it, followed it down some dusty desert track.

To the east they went on his own whim, direct and unerring, pausing only to menace the thieves unfortunate enough to impede them. It was by utter happenstance that Conan stumbled across one last, great trove of treasures piled in a cave at the foot of a mesa near the desert's lip. Searching for a closed space to spend the night, he had ridden down a faint but solid footpath to the cliff face and took the two men on watch by surprise. What a sight it must have been, he thought gladly, that last image fixed in their eyes: a huge man on a sinewy steed, galloping upon them with a hound of hell spitting sulphur on his heels. One of the men had screamed as he died and there was a clamour from the tunnel beyond. Five more men rushed out, some armed with deadly crossbows, but Conan smashed them all down like mounds of clay, pounding the dry earth into red mud.

Inside, the cavern was a wonder of riches, arranged by forms and colours, glinting like a rainbow in the last of the slanted daylight. Though he still cared nothing for ill-gotten treasure, the sheer variety of objects intrigued him. Among the gold and jewels were scrolls, inks, delicate glasswork. Valuable, of course, but hardly worth the care required to move them safely. Searching through these unusual stockpiles, Conan came upon a heavy tome bound in white leather and white hair, the pages bone-pale and the script scratched in a jagged language that seemed to bear teeth at his ignorance of its meaning. The moment he touched it, the red maw was at his side, pointed ears turned forward.

"The Book of Skelos," it said, enunciating carefully. An academic, lecturing before a student; that was the tone. "A compilation of arcane researches collected in the time of Xaltotun and the empire Acheron, focusing chiefly on the art of necroma—"

Conan dropped the book to the floor, felt petty pleasure as the red maw shook itself and growled, stalking away.

The cavern proved to be a series of catacombs threading the mesa's foundations, opened to the flats beyond in several different places. It was large enough that he felt reasonably sure it would be possible to escape detection even if another cohort of brigands returned from the dunes by night. Still, while such solid shelter appealed to him, dusk was a precious time for a desert traveller. With light went the hardship of the day's heat. It was sometimes safe to travel for hours, pitfalls marked by stark shadows with all the sky coolly aglow overhead. If the mesa had been unclaimed, the stay would have been worthwhile; but staring around at that dragon's hoard — heaps and rows of valuables filling a hollow that resonated with three times the space of a galleon's hold — he could not believe that his trespass would go undiscovered for long.

Laden with water and food, he went to untether his pony. Before he reached the pole at the cave's mouth, his eye fell on the red maw and what he saw gave him pause. The demon had returned to the white book on the floor, nosed it open and — with fine manipulations of its claws that bent them into a weird mockery of human fingers — picked through the thick pages delicately. It searched for something, Conan realized. The thought put a deep, awed uneasiness in him and he advanced on the creature at once.

"If that book is as you claim, it is a thing of true evil. I will have no part in bearing its—"

His words trailed as the demon drew back, revealing the focus of its interest. Even in half-light slipping through the fingers of darkness, Conan could clearly discern the starkly illuminated page; its pristine whiteness, its shark-tooth script, and the painted image. A perfect representation of Khalar Zym's prize. Gaping hollows, carapace limbs. The mask of Acheron.

Conan knelt, his ire forgotten. Cursing and goading the demon, he demanded that the script be read aloud and the book explained. Several times the red maw coughed deep in its black chest, but it was unable to summon any voice that could say more than: _A compilation of arcane researches collected in the time of Xaltotun and the empire Acheron, focusing chiefly on the art of necromancy and other invocations of the dead by summoning and by artifacts cursed or divine._

They lingered no longer in that rich, secluded tomb. Sand flew beneath the rugged pony's hooves, stars and sunlight sleeking together in the glass bowl of the sky as it ran and ran. Into verdant Vendhya Conan plunged with the Book of Skelos tied tight against the strong curve of his back. The hungry desert had burned hotter than his own tempers for a time, sealed them away in some stony cavity of his heart. With one glimpse of that mask they had been torn free, slavering and starved. It was, in his fevered mind, the instrument of his homeland's destruction. Shards of the hideous thing had been scattered across Cimmeria, guarded and secret.

Secret, they had thought; his father, his tribesfolk, all the Cimmerian bloodlines in the north. Secret, but for a book in a desert cave, white as old bones.

 

* * *

 

Through Vendhya he prowled in search of answers, of information, of a reader in the ancient tongues. None knew the glyphs and sigils chuckling in the bleached binding of that ancient tome. He explored Vendhya's wonders, places holy and unholy, careless of his own safety. There was no patience in him for subterfuge. He wanted knowledge, threw himself down any path that might harbour it. A library in a soaring white tower; a low squat monastery surrounded by paddy fields; even the palace of the Devi Yasmin, where all her wise advisors could say nothing to him of the words within the pages. He did not know why his passion burned so fiercely, what knowing these hateful words would achieve. But he could not stop. He could not sleep. His heart boiled black and his mind raced. It was poison, the image on the page, the love in his heart. They were avenged, his people and their pride, but they were not at rest, not in him.

To aid his search, Conan sent the red maw from his side. He had not been sure if such a thing was possible, feared that perhaps the beast was bound to him by some diabolical cord shared between their natures; but it vanished as it was bidden, much in the way it had done for Mernaz at the core of her dark and distant jungle. Back to the Amazon, he had commanded; or to Hyrukania, Stygia, anywhere. Only find the voice to speak these words, he had said. And it fell away on the wind, a nightmare banished by waking, obedient.

Alone, Conan stripped back the splendor of civilized Vendhya and uncovered a wasteland barren of enlightenment. He dared the black markets, streets all edged with scavenger-eyes and whispering daggers; he brought it to merchants at the coastal harbours and they only tried to bargain for it, disinterested. His only lead came from the people on the streets, chattering of demons and spirits idly. Among the fantastic creatures of obvious invention, Conan heard mention of serpentine beings darkening the clear waters of a lagoon nestled between nearby Kosala and the Southern Sea. These beasts he sought out when every other track and notion turned up nothing, well aware that he chased a superstition. They were said to climb the cliffsides and throw unwary people into the lagoon to be devoured. They were said to be wise and well-spoken, they were said to grant wishes to those who brought them beautiful baubles from afar.

Conan brought only steel and a book murmuring of the rites to raise dead things, but they came from far enough. On foot, he circled the great lagoon, twice traversing the high shoal that held it back from the sea. Three islands stood central in the still water, knuckles of rock marring its mirrored surface. By day and night he watched them for signs of movement, sleek forms drawing up from the salty shallows, and saw nothing. He watched the water for shadows, only to be dazzled by the reflection of unbroken light. He waited, his back to the crashing sea for a week, stricken with unreasonable patience.

The red maw found him there, just as he had begun to suspect it would not return. Its fiery leer lit the dusk and its eyes blazed near, bright and victorious; but when Conan questioned it, the demon coughed ashes and chewed on its ignorance merrily.

"Dead," was all it would answer. "Dead, dead, dead, dead."

In fury he sent it to the lagoon, told it to search until it spoke to the cold water or whatever things might lurk within it. He slept well, at least, knowing that the demon haunted the shore in his service. Strange, to trust something so hated.

Strange, yes; but hardly misguided. By that very morning it came to stand over him, damp and silvered with salt. It breathed heat and the smell of burning scale over him, hissed in anger when he threw it back with a great, irritated swing of his arm. Or he thought that it had hissed until it repeated itself precisely. Some curling sound, all long vowels and breathlessness, poured from its hot mouth awkwardly. He stared and it spoke again, if speech this was, in the same breathless cadence. Now over hard-edged syllables. Now over long pauses and inhuman emphasis. A dozen languages ran through its teeth, two dozen, three. Conan recognized individual words from his eavesdroppings in Messantia, in Zabhela, in the tiny fishing town beside this very sea. Still he could not divine the meaning. His despair frothed in him. The sea, his heart's match, crashed hard against the earth.

Then, tilting its head, the red maw suddenly opened its mouth on a grin. The sea fell back, and it added: "Such a thing does not need reading. The dead will know what to do with it."

 

* * *

 

To Conan, the words were a riddle with an obvious answer and it seemed that the red maw shared his thought. Further east than any northern man or woman had gone, there was said to be a foul swamp clinging to the shelf of the continent, a spoiled region under a great, shining empire built from dragon's scales and pieces of the celestial scaffold. The swamp of the dead it was called, buried under the emperors of Khitai. It was myth, Conan knew; but then all things were myth until the moment they were discovered. He continued east with no care for rest or food, dreaming of corpses in the bellies of cream-coloured dragons when he slept. Mountains rose up in his path like iron gates but the red maw's deep prints unlocked them, winding through low passes and migratory trails to the open land beyond.

In Khitai, Conan was as foreign as ripe fruit in winter. The few folk he encountered during his passage though meadows and seeded fields gaped at him openly, gave him space as though he were a frenzied bear barrelling down from the hills. He bore this stigma gladly enough, thinking that nothing should dare delay him from his morbid destination.

He skirted cities and villages and family hutches until there were none left to avoid. The earth, dark and fertile, began to blacken under his blistered feet, softening like rotted flesh, the flora bending sluggishly under constant fog and clinging rain. Melancholy came down out of the sky, grey misery made palpable, a sorrowful mantle for his slumped shoulders. The far end of the world. It was weeks, months, lifetimes from the old lands he had called home. It was a wavering path of solid ground in a bog that churned with the sudden movement of things he could not see. Even the red maw paced close to his side, even it stood gazing out at the long, cloudy mire mourned by dark trees and sighed.

Sleep would not come to Conan in that silent, somber place. He sat, once, with his back to a slimy tree and the red maw at his feet. Closed his eyes and saw other eyes looking back at him. From that moment, he did not even consider pausing to take rest. Time ceased to press him with its measure and there was no sun and there was no night and he wandered, searching for no place or purpose at all. The way back was unclear; he drifted. So it was in a instant of perfect, cagey wakefulness that the form of his father Corin drew itself slowly and proudly out of the cold muck to stand firm in his path, blank-faced and immovable.

The red maw yelped, a nauseating sound that split the thick atmosphere open as though it were burned skin. Delight, Conan thought. Joy at the sight of a loved one. His heart leaned swollen and sick in his chest. He looked into Corin's face, as cragged and fearsome as he had ever recalled it. He thought of long hours at the forge, witness to the crafting of unbreakable tokens of war as stark shadows divided that beloved face.

"The Book of Skelos," the red maw said, scholary and sly, advancing on him, urging him to some uncanny precipice.

"What do you want?" Conan snarled at it, overwhelmed by his apathy. Where, he thought, was the fury? What business had a beast in reminding him of the pain of loss?

"What do you want?" it snarled back. And in another voice: "What do you want?" And another: "What you do you want?" And over and over, until Conan ceased to hear it, looking at his proud, powerful father made small and sad by death. It was his voice that had always made him strongest, and here he stood, voiceless. Conan recalled it with perfectly clarity, booming over the rattle of flames and the clash of blades. At the forge with his father, Conan had learned all he knew of happiness. When he was young, he watched that almighty arm hammer beautiful blades out of crude blanks, and he had asked about war; and Corin had told him it was his lifeblood, Crom's gift to the strongest warrior. Satisfied by that, Conan had asked about peace, and Corin laughed. Grinning into the coals, his face lit by the grip of hell, he had answered: "Peace! For a Cimmerian there can be no such thing."

Slinging his pack into the crook of his arm, Conan withdrew the white book. Pearly as a child's first tooth it gleamed in his callused hand. He could not pretend to understand its power, or to know if it had played any part in leading ruin to Cimmeria as he had known it. He could not even loathe its contents, if within was an incantation that would restore in him the fierce contentment he had felt as a boy. That love of family and home, that restful purpose; it might be folded away in his grasp even now. At that thought, a grim impulse flexed in him. He could not guess at its cause, only opened the book and held it out and dropped it into the mire at his feet. In the same instant the red maw choked on its voices and lunged, knowing his mind too late. The swamp was swifter. Shapes like hands rose from the murky depths like horrible, colourless fish flashing against the surface of a stagnant pond. Before it touched the water, they had clasped the book and pulled it under, leaving no trace of its presence at all.

The red maw was still for a time, working its jaws slowly. Bristling, braced on stiff legs, it called then on a voice that Conan knew well, a sly and grating voice that echoed in his mind over an unholy chasm. It came from the blasphemous black mouth of the demon, steaming and hissing there among the drooping sedge, but it was the voice of the bandit-king Khalar Zym.

"Barbarian," it said. "I don't like you anymore."

With a single mighty stroke, Conan drew steel and severed the top of the red maw's skull at the hinge of its flaming jaw. Cinders burst from its throat as though it might be a campfire tumbling down in the late evening. It made no sound, only fell to soot and sank away as Corin's gaunt shade looked on, as the whole of Conan's clan climbed up to stand around him, unseeing as they had been for years, unseeing as they would remain.

 

* * *

 

Crom's mountain was said to be in the north; but how far north would a mortal man need to range before he encountered the realm of a god whose eye was lifted away from the warriors who exalted him, whose invincible hand would never reach out to shield his disciples?

Conan went north, over the shoulders of continent where they scraped ice from the sky, roaming to meet and pursue the cold winds that must lead him into the god's good graces. He went into the featureless snows, slew great beasts in the shape of men matted up in hair and starving mountain cats with teeth like ritual knives. North, and the chill began to seize his thundering heart with its searing, senseless torment and loss and love held inside. It did not grant him relief but it was something new, something fascinating. He went north until he could not remember how far he had walked, until his sword sang with the cold and his fingers were as black as his hair. Until nothing moved around him and the sky was white and the ground was white and there was only a terrible peace. With no marks anywhere to give him bearings, Conan sat and gazed at the white sky or earth, wondering what else there was to be done.

At length he lay himself out in the cold, in the whiteness. The crisp outline of his own body disturbed him and he spent a moment searching for other shapes and hollows in the snow. The crest of a ridge. The gleaming bowls of his footprints smoothing away. Silver cliffsides, far and high. Black paws, snow deep. Hellfire eyes, like sacrilege in such cold. A mouthful of cinders. A child's voice, saying: "Go back home."

Saying: "It may help you."

 

* * *

 

The red maw led him away from perfect north down to the ragged, tumbling, winter green hills of the northern tribelands that Conan had known, perhaps, in another life. He wondered if it carried him; he did not recall taking himself through the tundra or down to the tree line, the hard earth, the brooding mists. He simply found himself there, back in the gloomy land where his life had ended and begun. He had left it behind twice because nothing remained to hold him there. So he had told himself. So it had felt.

He walked, following the faint outline of a wolf in the fog or else his own instincts. Each of his limbs burned but his heart was quiet, so he walked until he came upon a village that looked, briefly, like a place he had once known. Cimmerian tribes ranged all around the dark northern forests, cutting lean lives out of the cold. At that first village, he was turned away. They said he looked as though he had been strong and admirable; once. At the next, the same, though children spooked away from his focused stare and then crept back to meet it, fascinated.

It was at the third that a woman named Zenobia came out to him before he had even entered the village at all. She circled him, measuring his worth in a single wintry inspection, and then asked him how he had come to that state she beheld. And he told her. And she listened, hearing the words as they were given, banking her judgement. She wore a broadsword as fine as Conan remembered in his own father's hand, and her leather armour crackled when she moved, tanned in blood. When he was done she told him that if he wished to rest and recover, he would be welcome in the village for a full change of the moon; and if he wished to do brave works in the aid of her people, he would be welcome longer. He acknowledged her words, followed her when she led him to the centre house.

He found that, for all he had changed, Cimmeria was unchangeable. It ate at weakness, put sharp edges on bodies and steel. It offered only scraps and trails, faint marks for those with the tenacity to build a life from very little; it left him no time for ghosts or wild hearts. For days, he dreaded the sight of wolves silhouetted on the horizon and the cinders that popped from a cookfire as it burned down in the night. But the demon did not reappear. Perhaps, he thought, it had left him at the mercy of the land and his memories of it. A brutal haven. A heartless home. A full change of the moon, and Conan would decide if that was enough.


End file.
